In the Highlands of Donegal

John Faulkner · n.d.

Medium

Watercolor and gouache over traces of graphite on ivory wove paper

Original size

54.5 × 45 cm (21 1/2 × 17 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

In the Highlands of Donegal captures the raw, elemental quality of Ireland's northwest — its sweeping moorland, dramatic skies, and the particular quality of Atlantic light that shifts from silver to gold within the space of an afternoon. John Faulkner was one of the most respected Irish landscape painters of the nineteenth century, a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy who returned repeatedly to the rugged scenery of Connacht and Ulster throughout his career. Working in watercolor and gouache over graphite underdrawing, he layered translucent washes with opaque passages of gouache to build depth and atmosphere — a technique that allowed him to suggest both the luminosity of an open sky and the dense, saturated greens of boggy ground. The ivory wove paper beneath adds a warmth that tinted papers of the period were specifically chosen to amplify. Faulkner exhibited extensively at the RHA from the 1860s onward and was widely recognised in his lifetime as a meticulous chronicler of a landscape that was rapidly changing under the pressures of emigration and land reform. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Faulkner's delicate layering into oils on canvas, preserving the tonal range and atmospheric stillness of the original while giving the work the physical presence and longevity that only a painted surface provides.